The Deja vu moment that reveals Bottas' true Hamilton deficit

Valtteri Bottas departed the Hungaroring having conceded the lead of the Formula 1 world championship to Mercedes team-mate Lewis Hamilton. Seeing a 13-point advantage turn into a five-point deficit in the space of two races does not inspire confidence that this, finally, could be the season Bottas finally comes good and topples Hamilton from atop his perch.

But Bottas himself remains resolutely determined, and upbeat - in the manner you might expect of an elite athlete who must maintain self-belief even in the face of that self-confidence being regularly and exactingly tested by the feats of wonder performed by someone else with exactly the same machinery at their disposal.

"I think my performance has been good," Bottas said after Sunday's race in Budapest, in which he finished third, behind Max Verstappen's Red Bull, while also conceding the bonus point for fastest lap to race winner Hamilton. "I think there have been some unlucky events. That has cost me a little bit. But performance-wise I am pleased. It's a very encouraging start.

"I think I do have the pace this year to win the title, but obviously it's an individual battle every single week. Everything needs to go right, but it didn't go right in Austria in the wet qualifying, and it didn't go right this weekend because of the race start.

PLUS: Why Hungarian GP was a race to recover from embarrassing errors

"But from each weekend I learned again massively. Going to Silverstone [the next race] I think I had pole there last year or the year before (it was last year). So, I am confident going there. It's a good track. I know Lewis is strong there, no doubt. He is strong everywhere. But I also believe in my ability to beat him. That's the big call for me."

There's that word 'belief' again. In Bottas' case, it is surely reinforced by those one-year rolling contract extensions he keeps grittily extracting from F1's best team - by being just quick enough and always playing nice. And those occasional moments of superiority he's carved out for himself during these three-and-counting punishing seasons racing alongside the best F1 driver of this era.

It's a tough job, but someone's got to do it - and this season it already feels as though Bottas has more responsibility than ever riding on his performances. The eyebrow-raising omnishambles at Ferrari, coupled with the aerodynamic "anomalies" Red Bull has engineered into the peaky RB16 - making it look frankly evil to drive - means already this championship looks like a clear two-horse race at best, especially so given the large-scale development freeze that now makes it even tougher for Mercedes' rivals to catch up.

And already, sadly, it looks as though Bottas is going to fall short, again.

I say this not because of what happened in the Styrian GP, where a glazed brake sapped him of confidence in wet qualifying. We all know how stunning Hamilton can be when he gets everything hooked up in the wet. Confident or not, and even with brakes working optimally, it's still always going to be a tall order to get one over Hamilton in such conditions. Bottas finishing second there, after starting fourth and passing Max Verstappen on track, was acceptable damage limitation

The performance on Sunday in Hungary is what's more troubling. OK, Bottas botched the start. That's one thing, but it happens, and he wasn't alone in that. But with the pace advantage his car now enjoys over the rest - similar to that enjoyed by Mercedes in the pre-2017 hybrid era, when F1 was the Hamilton versus Nico Rosberg show - Bottas should have recovered to second place again.

But he didn't. And it's not only those extra four points lost to Hamilton (including that bonus one remember) that makes this race significant, it's the manner in which Bottas fell short that exposes the true nature of the incredibly challenging task he faces in trying to best Hamilton in a gloves-on (Mercedes surely won't allow them to come off!) title fight.

It still feels as though there's more to this than a simple tyre offset; that if roles were reversed Hamilton would have found a way to catch Verstappen sooner, and make the decisive move

With the top three cars way out in front in this race, Mercedes gave Bottas a fresh set of tyres and 20 laps with which to eliminate a 21-second deficit to Verstappen's Red Bull-Honda. This looked doable: the RB16, though clearly decent in race trim compared to over a single lap, is less consistent than the Mercedes W11, harder on its tyres at the moment, and Verstappen was driving on rubber 13 laps older than Bottas was using.

Starting the final lap, Bottas was finally within one second of Verstappen, but still too far back to make a move heading into Turn 1. So that was it; chance missed. Bottas had to settle for third.

In the 2019 Hungarian GP, the top two cars were way out in front, so Mercedes gave Hamilton a fresh set of tyres and 21 laps with which to close down a 19s deficit to Verstappen's Red Bull-Honda, which was on tyres 13 laps older than Hamilton's. The RB15 was a better car relative to the Mercedes W10 than this year's RB16 looks so far against the W11, and Verstappen qualified on pole for the 2019 race (as opposed to seventh this year), but Hamilton had the advantage of using medium Pirellis to Verstappen's hards, whereas in 2020 there was no compound offset between Bottas and Verstappen.

Perhaps this is the only reason Hamilton was able to catch and pass Verstappen with four laps left to run in 2019, whereas Bottas fell short this year. Certainly, that's what Bottas could tell himself should he feel the need to rationalise the defeat. On the flipside, Hamilton's charge likely required greater management of a relatively softer tyre compound on a much hotter track, so perhaps it wasn't as easy as he made it look...

It still feels as though there's more to this than a simple tyre offset; that if roles were reversed Hamilton would have found a way to catch Verstappen sooner, and make the decisive move.

The way each of the Mercedes drivers manages the energy driven through the sensitive and delicate Pirelli tyres was a key area of weakness Bottas identified relative to Hamilton during their first season together in 2017. And there remains a deficit. We saw this at Silverstone last year, where Hamilton completed the race on one pitstop fewer than Bottas, meaning Hamilton would likely have won regardless of the safety car period that helped him overtake his team-mate. Hamilton even set fastest lap on hard tyres that were 32 laps old...

And there was Japan, where Hamilton forced Mercedes into a strategic bind because he was clearly quicker than Bottas but bottled up behind. Hamilton felt the team's inflexibility cost a 1-2 result in that race, as Hamilton had to concede second to Sebastian Vettel's Ferrari; it was another example of Hamilton's ability to use the tyres precisely and make a race of it even from a disadvantaged track position.

Bottas has worked hard to close the gap, but this is an area of mastery in Hamilton's game that is sometimes underappreciated. As well as being astoundingly quick, Hamilton has become extremely clever with it. And this is his 10th season driving on Pirellis, so he has an experience advantage over his team-mate that isn't diminishing with time - Hamilton is still learning and improving too.

After recovering to second in the season-opening Austrian GP, Hamilton was looking his dangerous best - harrying Bottas from behind, applying pressure, asking questions. Had Mercedes not felt forced to call its drivers off because of those gearbox reliability concerns it would have been interesting to see whether that race would have played out differently.

PLUS: How Bottas won F1's survival of the fittest in Austria

Recall, too, Monza 2019 when Hamilton went wheel-to-wheel with Charles Leclerc but failed in his efforts to oust the Ferrari driver from the lead. Hamilton eventually gave up the chase, allowing Bottas - with seven laps of tyre-life advantage over Leclerc, plus the extra management he'd been able to do while holding a safe watching brief in third - a chance to attack for victory over the final 12 laps.

Bottas could do nothing with it. He didn't even come close to threatening Leclerc's position in the way Hamilton had. F1 cars naturally behave very differently when the airflow is seriously disturbed by the car ahead compared to when running in clean air, which also takes a huge toll on the tyres. Bottas knows this, of course, but still received a stark lesson in Hamilton's mysterious ability to make his car work incredibly well even while enduring this physical handicap.

Of course, Hamilton ultimately lost the race that day. He's not a miracle worker, and his tyres gave out from fruitless pursuit of Leclerc. Hamilton finished third, behind Bottas, but even on a day when Bottas beat his team-mate to the finish, he looked the inferior driver.

It felt that way again before Mercedes called off Hamilton's attack in Austria, and again when Bottas failed in his pursuit of Verstappen in Hungary - a Deja vu moment that suggests Bottas still has much more than a five-point mountain to climb if he's to make a real fight of this world championship.